


Epilogue

by Steals_Thyme (Liodain)



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Carrying a torch like it's the Olympics, F/M, M/M, OT3ish, PTSD, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Karnak, Presumed Dead x2 Combo, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, identity crisis, suicidal behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 03:52:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4124667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan doesn't spring Rorschach from Sing Sing. This is the fallout.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epilogue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etherati](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/gifts).



> Once upon a time, I promised Eth I'd write a coda to her fic, [Fracture.](http://etherati.livejournal.com/58923.html) Here it is, years later and about ten times longer than I intended it to be. Oops.

Something like an earthquake has cracked Sing Sing open and spilled out its unshackled innards. Rorschach steps over a groaning felon and out into the smoke-heavy air, and tries to make sense of the obliterated skyline.

There has been monumental change since he was locked away. His city has been razed to the ground and left to smolder in a wasteland of girders and charred stone, shredded fiber, fractured glass. It feels as though he has been imprisoned for centuries, not weeks. Civilization has ground itself to dust in his absence. There may be nobody left to denounce him for his sins nor forgive him for them, and the thought is like being reborn a second time.

At first he doesn't know what to do, and he can't figure out if his indecision is because he has no purpose living in the shadow of such devastation, or too much.

His uniform is gone, looted and mauled in one of the frenzied waves of rioting, symbolic destruction that came close to being literal while he was clawing his way to freedom. He's left stripped and raw, disguised in his exposure. 

Nobody will be looking for him.

*

It takes him the best part of a day to get back to the city, following the metro-north line. He takes in the immensity of the destruction as he goes. It's spread along clear delineations, like ley-lines. The further into Manhattan he gets, the more dense the ruins, buildings toppled in chain reactions of gas explosions and electrical fires. Great white clouds of vapor billow from ruptured steam pipes.

He makes his way to Daniel's brownstone first. It's a deliberate decision, to get it out of the way. He lingers on the sidewalk, hands tucked under his arms, stamping to keep the feeling in his toes. Like a lot of this neighborhood, the house looks mostly intact. Some windows are broken, others almost opaque with the foul, greasy residue that covers most of the borough. The front door has fallen out of square; the place has the air of the abandoned.

He stands silently for a minute, and then moves on.

*

It's taken a while, but he has started recognizing himself again. The mustache had to go; besides looking ridiculous, it was too much maintenance to keep dyeing it. The brutal crop Laurie gave his hair has grown out a little. He leans on the washbasin and inspects himself in the cracked mirror. He has tiredness drawn in dark circles beneath his eyes and lines in his face he doesn't remember being there two months ago, but at least they feel like they belong to Daniel Dreiberg and not Sam Hollis.

Through in the other room, Laurie is stealing yet more motel towels, bottle-blonde hair swinging in her face as she bludgeons them into her rucksack. "We good?" she asks, pulling the bag as far closed as she can and heaving it over her shoulder. Her cheeks are pink from her efforts, and Dan feels a rush of affection. She didn't have to come with him, but here she is, being practical and ridiculous.

"I dunno," Dan says. "I think we could use more towels."

She rolls her eyes and makes a face at him, unchains the door and hikes her thumb into the bleary dawn. "C'mon, let's amscray."

*

Laurie drives. The scenery skids past in a stream of monochrome and the road drones beneath them, lulling and awful. This is the part Dan hates the most, when he has no distractions and too much time to think about what he should have done differently, how he should have, _could_ have stopped things turning out the way they did. His mind spins out all the scenarios, all the diverging paths that arrive, unfailingly, in outcomes better than this one.

If he had listened to Rorschach, trusted his intuition like he always used to. If he had been at Moloch's with him. If he had sprung him from Sing Sing before he pulled that stunt with the fryer and put the prison into a full lockdown. 

He wonders how it would have gone down at Karnak, if Rorschach had been there. He imagines it would not have been as shameful, or as bloodless.

If only he had done everything thirty-five minutes sooner. If only he had, maybe they could have stopped this.

If he had only just—

"Hey." Laurie snaps her fingers. Her eyes stay on the road ahead.

"Do you think he's still alive?" Dan asks her, even though he doesn't want this conversation again. His hope just needs a little validation.

She takes a short, irritated breath. "That's not why we're doing this." She shoots him a sidelong glance. "Is it?"

"No, but." Dan sighs, tries to imbue it with all his frustration and regret, tries to clear his head. "God, I just want to rewind everything." 

He can see Laurie tense up. She knows what he's going to say. He hates that he's going to say it anyway.

"Do you think Jon—"

"No," she says. "Just fucking don't, okay."

It starts to rain; first the tick of droplets, and then fat rivulets that slide down the windscreen like oil. The desiccated wipers add their thump-squeak to the monotony of the road. The passenger window is cool against Dan's skin when he rests his temple against it. He closes his eyes. 

"We'll know about it," Laurie says after a while. She moves a hand off the wheel and touches his arm, still without taking her eyes off the road. "If he's still out there. I mean, if anyone's a survivor, it's him. A real cockroach, no offense. And you know the kind of mess he makes, what things to look for." She signals before changing lane, even though the road is empty. "Hey," she says, "pass me a soda?" 

Dan hands her a Tab in silence.

*

Another night, another motel. The last one. They'll reach New York City tomorrow. It shows, too; it's stripped to the very basics, even for a roadside flophouse. The mattress has no sheet and Laurie suspects she used most of the hot water when she took her two-minute shower. She doubts there will even be running water when they get home, never mind anything remotely warm.

She lies on the bed while Dan takes his turn, and wonders if she'll ever feel like sleeping with him again.

It's not that she doesn't like him—she does, a lot. Probably loves him, even—but after all the heavy shit they've been through, sex seems too ephemeral, too transient. Kinda pointless, all told. She guesses it's meant to be life-affirming, but to her it just feels like loss, over and gone too soon. It's not quantifiable enough, not like the miles and the days and the motel towels. She doesn't know if Dan feels the same way, but he doesn't seem to want it any more than she does.

Maybe they're both depressed, who the hell knows. It's not like that would be a surprise.

The water shuts off, and then it's time to sleep. Dan slips into bed behind her and pulls her close. He's damp still, and warm, soft against the back of her thighs when spoons around her. It's nice. She doesn't know why she wants to cry in particular. She has plenty of reasons, why pick just one?

Dan just holds her tight and strokes her hair, says, "shhh, it's okay," and that sets her off, bawling. He hugs her until she calms to sniffles and wet sighs, her eyes sore and head throbbing. 

"Fuck." Her voice is thin and shaky. "I'm really dreading this."

"Yeah," Dan says, just as shaky. "Yeah."

*

Rorschach's arms and shoulders ache from hauling rubble. His fingers are bruised and cement-burned, fingernails bloody and shredded. There aren't enough gloves or tools to go around. Most of them are doing this with their bare hands, in silent groups that work in the corners of the city where Veidt's contractors won't. His hair is gray with dust, and it cakes his throat and nostrils. 

His plan was to somehow hunt down whoever set him up at Moloch's, but the people working among the debris had made him falter on his mission, and then stop. Nobody had said anything to him when he had begun shifting collapsed masonry, no wariness or even acknowledgement of his prison-issue clothing. Just a solemn nod. Maybe they think they're granting him redemption in this work. 

They talk among themselves. Soon, one of them mentions an alien.

Eventually, Rorschach realizes they aren't talking about Doctor Manhattan.

*

Only one of Rorschach's bolt-holes is still uncompromised: a moldering old dockside warehouse on a landing, boarded up and abandoned. The others have been commandeered for emergency shelters and field hospitals and soup kitchens, crammed full of desperation.

There is desperation here also, held in the remnants of an old rag once used as tourniquet, in the rust-spatter of blood absorbed into the concrete floor, and in a scatter of brittle old sutures—somewhere among the packing crates is a crumpled bullet that almost had his name on it—but all the urgency of that time has long dissipated. All that's left is the ache of memory and an itch in his scars.

He sits on the edge of a crate and tries to piece things together. He had assumed bombing, or Russian missiles, but in retrospect that makes no sense. No militia, except to help with relief work. No propaganda. No anger. Only grief. It's more like the city is surviving the aftermath of a natural disaster, not an attack.

Manhattan has vanished, some say to Mars. Perhaps because he inadvertently called the extraterrestrial down onto New York's collective heads like so much intergalactic bait.

*

It's the first night back ( _home_ , Dan tries, but it doesn't feel right, not with his basement empty and his house turned over; his possessions investigated, bagged and labelled). There's a rare light on in the neighborhood, where people have risked jury-rigging thick twists of jumper cables into a functioning spark hydrant. Dan wonders about the unlit houses, if their owners huddle in the dark, mourning, or if they lie under a collapsed building, or under a makeshift shroud.

The brownstone itself has no power, though there's a generator in his workshop. Dan doesn't even consider firing it up; it would be needlessly risky to draw attention to themselves like that. Especially since they took so much care to sneak in through the basement tunnels, levering up a manhole cover a street over to do it. He doesn't know if the authorities are still interested in him and doesn't care to find out the hard way.

The kitchen smells funky. Probably the refrigerator. 

Nothing is in its place; most of his stuff has been spread out all over the floor, by Fine and Bourquin's team or maybe by people scavenging. In the perma-dark he can't tell what's missing, besides all the food from the kitchen cupboards and most of his blankets and towels from the linen closet. If he's honest, he doesn't really mind. They will have gone to people who needed them. Better than just sitting there, unused.

They close all the blinds, pull all the drapes, and Dan finds the votive candles he has in case of power outages, usually kept stashed at the very bottom of a box of junk tucked on top of a kitchen cabinet, but now conveniently tipped out over the linoleum. 

He sets them on the coffee table and lights all seven of them, one by one. Laurie kneels on the other side, leans over, eyes closed and hair lit golden, and for an awful moment Dan thinks she is praying. 

"What's on your mind?" he asks, gentle.

She looks up, cocks her fingers like a pistol and mimes. "Just thinking I shoulda shot twice. Bang. Bang."

*

The towels come in very handy. Dan admits this grudgingly as they sit cross-legged on the floor and wipe down from another day of laboring. They're coated in dust and debris, sweat and blood, and that gross slime that is smeared over everything.

"Told you," Laurie says, unashamedly smug as she dips the corner of one into a pan of water, carefully rationed from their meager allotment. She wipes at her face, working streaks of clean skin out from behind the grime. "Ugh," she wrinkles her nose, coughs black, gritty phlegm into her palm. "Yuck. Maybe we should be wearing masks."

Dan opens his mouth, closes it again. Laurie smiles at him, sly.

*

Four days later, Dan sees a man in the kitchen queue. He's wearing a grimy shirt and has his back to him. He has red hair—sandy red, not vivid red, and it's pin-straight anyway. He's too tall and his stance is wrong. Dan knows that it isn't him, has studied the mugshots more intently than he'd admit to anyone, but he can't help it. He takes a step towards the man and almost puts a hand on his shoulder, but then the man turns. His face is cast in profile and he isn't Rorschach at all. 

It's a kick in the gut even though he should know better. He tells himself he shouldn't hope, but it's hard to deny himself that when it's one of the few things he has left. 

*

Like a lot of nights, Rorschach can't sleep. When turning over and over on the scabrous excuse for a bed makes his temper fray, he gets up and he walks it off, paces through the broken pitch-black streets and interrupts trouble where he finds it.

When there is none, he casts his eyes down and thinks about how the city used to be. Without the streetlights, it is easy to imagine it's the same; still a yawning pit of depravity ready to eat him whole, instead of cracked open with a literal pit for a heart. The further away he gets from the epicenter, the more the streets even out and he can close his eyes and travel the paths from memory. He is not surprised when he finds himself in Daniel's neighborhood. He hasn't been here for some time, and his old wounds like to reopen themselves.

He is more surprised by a bloom of light, faint between the drapes in an upstairs window. Someone moving about with a candle or flashlight on the stairs, heedless of how it travels into the rooms. 

Surprise gives way to a cold trickle of anger. Empty or not, that is Daniel's house.

It is not some squat to be claimed by whoever kicks the lock in.

He breaks into a jog, circling around to the back of the row. The windows at the rear are all dark; the intruders have probably bedded down for the night. He will go to the warehouse and enter through the basement. The time it will take to get there will only mean they will be less alert, if not asleep. Easier to take them unawares.

The warehouse doors are splintered in. The interior is damp and cold, and everything has been ransacked. There was nothing of value here, Rorschach knows, just empty crates and rusting machinery for show, but it still makes him furious. At least the trap door is untouched, probably went entirely unnoticed. He creeps down on his hands and knees to shuffle a brick loose in the far corner. Behind is an emergency switch. This is how they got in, if either of them found themselves here without the remote activation from Archie or Dan's portable controller. 

He reaches in and feels about in the wall cavity until his fingers stray across a button. There's an immense grinding noise and the floor parts in the center, dust and debris falling inward.

Rorschach vaults down, the slap of his feet on the stone below echoing out. Another concealed switch, and the trap door closes overhead, swallowing him.

*

Something rouses Dan from the edge of sleep, jerking him into wakefulness just as he was about to fall. A faint noise, felt rather than heard. Familiar, but—

He frowns and lifts his head off the wad of clothes that serves as his pillow, and strains to listen. At his back, Laurie grumbles and rolls over with most of the blanket.

There it is again: a resonant grinding, below the strata of night sounds. He recognizes it this time, and he is wide awake in an instant, pulling on this week's boxers and t-shirt before fumbling for his glasses. He pads out of the room, circumventing the noisy floorboards on the landing, to wait and listen at the head of the stairs.

It's quiet. Adrenaline buzzes in his ears.

There's a length of greasy lead piping propped against the banister, scavenged out of the basement. Just in case, he'd said to Laurie. She had furrowed her brow and nodded, then spent the rest of the night making tasteless jokes about post-apocalyptic survivalism. _Water facilities are essential! Use them to beat your enemies to death!_

It broke the tension, but it doesn't seem so funny, now. For all the combat situations he's been in, he's never had to defend his own home. There's something subduing about that, to realize he was always safe at the end of the night.

It's quiet. The pipe is heavy and cool in his hand.

He steels himself and takes the staircase a step at a time, slowly. By the time he's halfway down, his eyes have become accustomed to the dark—it really is darker than he's ever known it to be—and he moves more assuredly, close to silently.

There is a shadow of a man, a silhouette just fractionally denser than the rest of the room. He stands in the center of Dan's devastated kitchen, breathing heavily enough for Dan to hear. He sounds angry, for reasons Dan has no interest in figuring out.

He adjusts his handhold on the pipe. It's warmed in his grip and his palms have gone clammy. He raises it, which was a mistake because the movement alerts the intruder to his presence. An alarmingly brief scuffle and he hits the floor under the weight of the man, and the pipe is wrenched out of his grip before he can catch his breath. Oh God, he thinks. Laurie. Will she be murdered in her sleep, or will she live to find his corpse in the morning? 

He sucks in some air and a smell hits him like a brick: old sweat, gutters, blood, all under the metallic tang of the pipe as it's pressed across his throat.

Something in his chest clenches hard. He can't remember ever being so glad to smell something so terrible. 

He tightens his hands around the man's wrists and keeps him from crushing his windpipe, shaking the kaleidoscope of stars from his vision. He struggles a knee under for leverage and pushes himself over, partially free.

"Rorschach," he coughs out, before the man decides to take a swing.

There's a loud _clang_ as the pipe hits the kitchen floor, and a yawning silence.

"Daniel?" Rorschach breaks the quiet. He is hoarse and incredulous.

"Yeah," Dan says. Alive, he's alive and he's _here_. His voice is shaking. His whole body is. "Who else were you expecting to find in my house?"

"Looters," Rorschach says. "Squatters. Not... you." His voice cracks. He sounds wretched, and Dan stumbles to his feet, towards him in the dark. "Rumors," he says, as Dan grasps his shoulder. "In prison. About Nite Owl. Stupid, stupid, shouldn't have listened."

He roughly twists his hands into the hem of Dan's shirt, like he's grounding himself. His knuckles dig into Dan's stomach. It's more uncomfortable than anything, but Dan welcomes the contact. 

"Thought you were dead," Rorschach mutters. It hangs in the air like an accusation, and Dan has to rein back the impulse to apologize because of course that news would blaze through Sing Sing like wildfire, and of course Rorschach would believe it was about his partner. They would let him believe it. Dan was always supposed to be the target, not Hollis. 

"It's okay," he says, even though it isn't and won't ever be. He tries not to think about what directionless vengeance Rorschach must have wreaked. "It wasn't me."

Rorschach sighs, and Dan senses him lean in almost imperceptibly. He feels as light as air, only grounded by the press of Rorschach's knuckles.

He leans in, too, unsure of what he's doing or why, but before he has to wonder about it, Rorschach steps away from him, alert.

"Dan, you down here?" It's Laurie, her voice foggy with sleep. There's the click of a lighter, and the kitchen is dimly lit in candlelight. She stares, attention flicking between Rorschach and Dan. Her expression is unreadable. "Hooo-ly shit. Look what the cat dragged in."

"Hello, Miss Juspeczyk," Rorschach says, stiffly. The feeble light makes him look gaunt and severe; it sends shadows to pool under his eyes and hollow his cheeks. Or maybe that's just how he is, Dan thinks, mask or no mask. All he has for comparison is his mugshot, and that wasn't any more flattering. 

"You look like hell," Laurie says, and laughs. "Have you been sleeping in a dumpster or something? Jesus."

Maybe the shadows flickered, or maybe it was a snarl pulling on Rorschach's mouth. Dan makes a pleading face at Laurie, a little taken aback at her venom even though he knows there's never been love lost between her and Rorschach.

Laurie shifts from foot to foot, then takes a step back into the hallway. "Come on then," she says, to Dan's relief. "It's freezing down here."

*

Rorschach sits on the edge of the bed in the guest room, threadbare chintz sheets rumpling under his weight. Juspeczyk is in the next room, heating water over a camp stove. Daniel is here, alive, watching him. He has been staring openly and unapologetically, and it is making him uncomfortable. Sometimes the candlelight strikes his glasses, like the way streetlights used to glance off Nite Owl's goggles, and that makes him uncomfortable, too.

He welcomes the feeling; it makes it easier to disguise the earth-spinning relief that keeps surging under his skin. 

Daniel reaches out and puts a hand on Rorschach's shoulder. "I was worried about what had happened to you," he says. He seems acutely aware of both Rorschach's discomfort and his own awkwardness, but doesn't seem inclined to stop for either of their sakes. "I'm glad you're okay." He squeezes, once, and mercifully lets go. 

A shiver prickles down Rorschach's arms and across the back of his neck. He is not okay, but he would never tell Daniel that. "Knew where I was," he says. "Know I can take care of myself." 

"Right," Daniel says. "But against an entire prison?" He scrubs one hand through his absurd haircut. "I flew over Sing Sing, before I went on to Antarctica. I had this crazy idea that I'd storm the place and bust you out, but it was locked down tight. I barely managed a circuit before NYPD 'copters chased me under the Hudson. Screechers barely slowed them down."

Rorschach stares at him. "Why," he says, and he can't believe such a question is necessary, "did you go to Antarctica?" 

Daniel's eyes widen and his mouth goes slack. "Oh shit," he says. "You don't know. God, of course not. How _could_ you know. You probably think—" 

Daniel looks like an idiot, and Rorschach wants to shake the expression right off his face. Grab his shoulders and yank him around and yell, squeeze some sense out of this situation because nothing is like it used to be, and he feels lost. 

"Nite Owl," he barks, and the way that Daniel responds to that, snapping to, stirs yet more unwelcome feelings. " _What is going on_. Did you know about alien? How?"

"No, I didn't know. Nobody knew. And it's not an alien. It's not an alien. But only Laurie and I know that. And you, now. And..." Daniel takes a deep breath. "Adrian," he says. "I went to Antarctica to stop him but I was too late. He did this, Rorschach. He engineered an alien and dropped it on New York."

"What."

"The Comedian's murderer? Your mask killer? Adrian. Manhattan didn't give anyone cancer, it was Adrian. Your set up? Adrian. His own goddamn assassin? Adrian. All Adrian." Daniel stares at him, jaw set. "He wanted to defuse a nuclear war. And the worst—the worst part is, it worked."

Rorschach stares back. For a second, he wonders if it's a hugely tasteless joke. Then Daniel looks down at his hands, forehead wrinkled in a worried frown, and he knows it can be nothing but the truth.

"What's your plan," he asks. The immensity of the situation has yet to penetrate—that'll come, later—but Daniel has had time to deal with this, so he must be working on something. A transgression this huge can't go unpunished.

"Plan?" Daniel snorts. "My plan is to move rubble and bodies until there's no more rubble and bodies left to move. Then maybe think about getting on with my life, whatever the hell that means."

"And Veidt?"

"What about him?"

"Evil must be punished. People must be told, Daniel."

Daniel slides his glasses off his face to pinch the bridge of his nose. "I'm too tired for this right now. We'll talk about this tomorrow, okay." The mattress shifts as he gets to his feet. 

Rorschach stands too (knees and fingers and back complaining, but he can still pretend they're no worse than they used to be) and catches Daniel's wrist. The man starts under his grip, then clasps his free hand on top of Rorschach's. Not the intended response—Rorschach only wanted to hold him in the room a little longer, squeeze out more information—but it serves. 

"Promise me," Daniel begins.

The shadows flicker and shift; Laurel moves into the doorway. Daniel drops his hands to his sides quickly, straightens his shirt, then shoves them into his pants pockets. Rorschach has caught less guilty-looking criminals red-handed. He wonders at Daniel's conscience.

"There's coffee next door," Laurel says, eyes fixed on Daniel. "If you don't feel like sleeping."

*

Dan lets out a long, quiet breath and turns over again. His heart is thudding hard in his chest, vibrating through his veins, and that sets him up for hours of restlessness even though he didn't touch the coffee. He doesn't know why he's even trying to sleep.

In the intense dark, it's easy to tell Rorschach still has a candle lit; the light flickers under the crack of the guest room door, casting ghostly shadows over the hallway landing. Dan finds himself thinking about the way Rorschach's knuckles had pressed into his stomach when he'd found him in the kitchen, the unexpected contact. He shifts the blankets down, off his sweating torso and reaches out to run a hand down Laurie's back, over the curve of her waist.

Laurie sighs, exasperated. "Would you just get up already? I kinda want to sleep tonight." She reaches out, finds his hand and gives it a squeeze. It takes the edge off her words.

Dan squeezes back. "Sure," he whispers. "Sorry." He untangles himself from the blankets and hunkers down, feeling for the billycan perched on the camp stove. The coffee's long cold, but that never bothered him much—nor Rorschach, as long as there was enough sugar in it—and it'd have to be much more disgusting to let it go to waste these days.

He hears Laurie raise her head as he leaves the room, and he stands on the landing for a while, partly in indecision, partly wondering why he feels like he's doing something wrong.

*

There's a soft rap on the door. Rorschach looks up from the stub of pencil and rumpled leaves of legal pad he'd found in the nightstand drawer. The pages are scrawled with his uneven handwriting, most of which he's scored out. His only plan was to find who set him up; Daniel dropped that answer neatly in his lap, but there are too many holes in his knowledge of events to figure out the framework of his misshapen new world and how to best deal justice in it.

Daniel cracks the door open without knocking a second time. "Um, hey," he whispers, blinking over the rim of his glasses. "Can't sleep either, huh?"

Rorschach makes a noise in the affirmative and returns to his notes. "Daniel. Need you to fill me in," he says. 

Daniel doesn't move right away, and when Rorschach glances back up, he is staring at him again. Rorschach feels denuded under his scrutiny; he is conscious that his prison shirt is in a rumpled pile at the foot of the bed, and that his arms are bare, scarred from old wounds and new, grazed and grimy from his toil in the ruins of the city. He tenses up, but Daniel doesn't abate.

"Must have seen me. In papers," he says. "On the news." He thinks about his spare uniform and hopes it is still secreted under his apartment floorboards. If his apartment is still there. He will investigate soon.

"Uh, yeah. Sorry." Daniel says, and finally looks away, at the floor then at the walls. "It's just a little weird."

Rorschach supposes that it is. He waits for Daniel to collect himself and stop his tentative hovering. At last, he seems to remember the tin he's carrying, and proffers it. "Coffee? It's cold, and there's no sugar, but..." He shrugs.

Rorschach shakes his head, gestures for him to put it down. "Later," he says. His brain is already a shambles, churning through scenarios faster than he can write them down, trying to tie what he knows together. Caffeine is the last thing he needs. "Tell me what happened, start from October twenty-first."

"October twenty-first?" Daniel repeats. "God, I dunno. That was months ago. I'm not even sure what day it is today."

"October twenty-first," Rorschach says again, impatience tightening his voice. "Night was arrested. Have had limited perspective since then."

"Oh. Of course. Jeez, I'm sorry, Rorschach." Daniel looks old, suddenly. Tired beyond exhaustion. The mattress dips as he sits on the edge of the bed. He takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes.

"Got sloppy. Walked right into a trap," Rorschach says gruffly. "Not your fault."

"Still feels like it," Daniel replies. "After all these years. Some part of me still feels like I should have your back. Maybe we could have stopped this if I had."

"Coulda, shoulda. Tried to warn you something tricky was up. Wasn't interested." Rorschach considers for a moment. "Ehn, doesn't matter. Veidt would have only taken you out, too."

"But, if I had known—"

"You didn't. Me neither, not for sure. Difference is, I wanted to find out." Rorschach feels an old contempt surfacing, a bitterness long entrenched by the Keene Act. "Should have known would take more than dead mask to bring you out of retirement."

"No," Daniel laughs, short and low. "It took a couple of... old friends in trouble. And the rapidly approaching end of the world, of course." He pauses, raises his eyebrows in a way that would be insufferably patronizing if it wasn't so familiar. "You think I faced off against Ozymandias wearing a knitted cardigan?"

Of course he didn't. Nite Owl flew again. And judging by the results, Rorschach isn't entirely sorry that he missed it.

Daniel clears his throat. "So, Laurie came to me, after Jon took off. For, for support."

Rorschach schools his expression, feels the paper buckle as his fist tightens. In the half-light, Daniel does not notice his distaste.

"I guess things finally got to us, first Blake, then the attempt on—then Adrian's faked assassination attempt, and Manhattan leaving. You getting caught was what finally pushed things into focus. For me," he hastily adds. "At least. We took Archie out, rescued a bunch of people from a tenement fire. Just like old times." The tiredness has melted away from him, his back straight, shoulders square. Eyes glittering. "Like coming home."

"Not exactly like old times," Rorschach says pointedly, only slightly sorry to see him deflate a little. "Take it Silk Spectre is also back in business."

"Yeah." Daniel furrows his brow and winces. "Aw, hell. Look, it's not like we're partners, or anything. I dunno what we are, really, I think maybe it was just a rebound thing? It's hard to tell, things are so..." he waves his hand vaguely.

"Don't care," Rorschach says, which is mostly true. "So. Planned a jailbreak?"

Daniel grins sheepishly. "We were already flouting the law, and the cops had started sniffing around my house, so hell. Thought we may as well give them something to keep 'em busy, but Manhattan turned up just long enough to snatch Laurie and zap back to Mars. It was already a risky proposal, I had no chance on my own."

"Jupiter on Mars," Rorschach says, and shakes his head. 

Daniel makes a face. "So I was on my own, kinda under pressure with Fine and Bourquin breathing down my neck, and I thought: what would Rorschach do." He shuffles further back onto the bed until his shoulders rest against the wall and discreetly stifles a yawn. "So I did that. Just with less metacarpal trauma. Following up Roy Victor Chess led me to Pyramid Deliveries, subsidiary of Pyramid Transnational, sister company of Luxor Imports, which is incorporated with Dimensional Developments, which—"

"Daniel."

"—that is to say, I followed the money, and spent a tedious old time pinging the SEC database and cross-referencing tax returns, and then Veidt Enterprises turned up, funding all of it one way or another."

Rorschach dips his head in approval. "Good work," he says, "if tenuous and inefficient."

"Hey, screw you," Daniel says mildly, smiling in a way that makes Rorschach feel hunted. "You want efficient? Check this out, I broke into Adrian's office and, um, hacked into his computer." 

"Hrrm." Daniel seems eager to impress, and technology was never Rorschach's forte. He will let him have this one.

"His itinerary said he had traveled out to Karnak, Antarctica that morning. So I followed. Jon and Laurie showed up soon after, but Adrian had already killed half of New York before we even found him in that godforsaken place. The end, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Nobody lives happily ever after." Daniel runs both hands through his hair, all triumph in his nascent criminal ventures evaporating. His head stays down, hands clasped at the nape of his neck.

"And you let him get away with it." 

*

Laurie hears Dan's tentative knock, then the sound of the guest room door. She sits up, legs bunched in front of her, pulls the blankets around her like a cape and rests her ear against the cold wallpaper. The walls in Dan's house are old—thick and dense and bad at conducting sound. If she strains hard she can just about make out the low-pitched murmur of their conversation, but nothing approaching details. She sighs in annoyance.

It's not that she doesn't trust Dan to tell her what's going on, it's just she prefers to know first-hand what kind of crazy bullshit plan Rorschach might be concocting. She's heard sanitized versions before when Dan was in the mood to tell war stories, but she could never get them to hang straight with his collection of scars.

She gets caught in a recent memory, one of the days in limbo after Christmas, long and grey and nothing much else to do at her mother's place but drink and sleep and wait. She's curled up on the couch with Dan, his cheeks flushed with too much cheap rum. _Of course, it wasn't the_ plan _to jump through the plate-glass window, but..._

_Of course, she replies, laughing._

The winter wind buffets the windows, and out in the street, a tin can rattles.

Laurie jerks upright, sweeping off eddies of nostalgia threatening to pull her deeper into the undertow of sleep. She's not sure how long she's dozed for, but there is still the murmur of conversation next door. 

"Hell with this," she mutters, and shakes out her pillow. It turns out to be one Dan's crumpled button-downs and she shrugs it on. It falls to mid-thigh on her. She fumbles around in the dark for her pipe and a tobacco parcel, then slips silently onto the landing.

"Why did you come back." She can hear much better, leaning against the banister next to the guest room door. Enough to hear all the layers of contempt to Rorschach's question. He always sounded harsh, but Laurie can't think she ever heard it directed at Dan like that.

"It's my home," Dan replies. "I came back to help." It's the truth, in part, but even to Laurie it's weak. He sounds too worn, too defensive. She wonders if Dan will ever tell Rorschach that he was looking for him. She wonders why she cares, if it would even mean anything to that blank-faced son of a bitch.

"Came to do penance for your failure."

A long silence, then a long, slow exhale from Dan. A quiet, defeated admission. 

"Pointless, you realize. Does little but assuage own guilt. More you could do."

"Yeah, I know what you want to do."

Laurie raises her pipe to her lips. Her lighter goes _tchk_ , and Rorschach has swung the door open before the flare of tobacco dies down. He glowers at her, but she ignores him for now, exhaling a sinuous curl of smoke. It's a brand that she doesn't care for, but her usual tastes too bittersweet these days.

"Miss Juspeczyk. Rude to eavesdrop," he says. In the gloom behind him, Dan throws his head back in an extravagant eyeroll.

"Is it more or less rude than breaking into someone else's house in the middle of the night?" she shoots back, sardonic expression falling into place like a mask. "I'd like to get this hierarchy of unacceptable behavior straight. Just so we both know where we stand."

"Laurie," Dan calls from the guest room. He does long-suffering so well. "Both of you. Could we talk like reasonable adults, please?" 

Rorschach shifts his stance, widening his legs in the doorway, arms folded. Like a bouncer, she thinks. Or like an animal protecting its territory.

"I'd love to," she calls back, "but it's not up to me."

A sigh from Dan, half-vocalized in exasperation. "Rorschach," he says, "let her in. Sit, both of you."

*

Laurie is resting against the dresser, gesticulating emphatically, heedless of her pipe. Rorschach has his back to the door, face like granite; he moves only to waft away skeins of tobacco smoke. Dan sits on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. The room is far too small for all three of them.

Their bickering is intensely frustrating, but the longer they keep it up without realizing they essentially agree with each other, the more time he has to think of a way to talk them out of doing something crazy. His watch says it's 4:28 am.

"Should have done something, should have stopped him," Rorschach growls. He's like a dog with a bone, over and over, worrying at the idea until it's dead and buried, and exhumed and buried again. 

"We tried," Laurie says, not for the first time, her voice clipped.

"Not hard enough." He chases away another blanket of tobacco smoke. It's hard to read the wave of his hand as anything but dismissive, intentional or not. Dan thinks that's what finally does it.

"You weren't there." Laurie pushes away from the dresser, hands fisted at her waist, pipe spiked between her fingers like brass knuckles. The shirt she's wearing rides up as she sets her shoulders. "I tried to kill him!" Her voice is laced with pain, too loud in the small room, ringing off its bare walls. Her expression crumples.

Dan's stomach does a weird flip. Her shot at Adrian hasn't gone unmentioned between them, but they hadn't been framing it quite like that, especially since it was unsuccessful. It's stark to hear the true intention behind it, out loud and not softened with bitter humor.

"I _wanted_ to kill him," she says, more softly this time. Her voice shakes. "I shot him, but he caught the bullet." 

Rorschach's expression finally cracks into something less inscrutable. He raises an eyebrow at Laurie, a brief reassessment.

"I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I wouldn't hesitate," she says, mouth pulled into an unhappy line. She looks up at Dan, then over to Rorschach, free hand raking through her hair. When she speaks again, she sounds fragile. "Look what he's done. I don't want to be a murderer."

"Nobody's asking you to," Dan says, the same time as Rorschach grates out, "It's not murder, it's justice."

"No," Dan says, firmly. This is exactly what he was afraid of, this insanity couched in righteousness. "We are not doing this. Nobody is killing anybody. Haven't we had enough of that? Do you really need to see one more body?"

"Learned nothing, Daniel?" Rorschach replies, advancing on him. He gets in Dan's space, a familiar experience, no less intimidating without the mask. Dan can taste the man's breath on his lips. "It's about doing what's right. No room for compromise." He steps back abruptly, turns to push open the guest room door. It shudders under his barely-reined aggression. "Will leave you to wallow in afterbirth of Veidt's new world. Enjoy."

"Rorschach, wait—"

"Be seeing you, Dreiberg. Miss Juspeczyk."

Dan moves without stopping to think, without second-guessing his instinct. Rorschach is going to get himself killed—get them all killed, destroy this tenuous peace in his pursuit of impossible ideological purity—and once again it's Dan's responsibility to talk him down, just like it had been in that horrifying, brutal time towards the end of their partnership. Dan rides on that resentment and grabs Rorschach before he can turn, and wraps an arm around his neck in a choke hold.

Rorschach makes a low, awful sound and turns feral immediately. It's a survival response Dan's seen before, and until now he'd never expected to be on the receiving end of it. It's like hugging a bale of barbed wire. Rorschach twists frantically in Dan's grip, torn fingernails clawing at him, then he sinks his teeth into Dan's forearm.

"Jesus, Rorschach," Dan gasps, shocked into stillness for an instant. He groans in pain and convulsively tightens the hold when Rorschach tries to stamp on his bare toes. He can feel the man's pulse raging against the crook of his arm. Rorschach struggles for a couple more seconds, the stubborn bastard, then gradually slumps to his knees on the landing carpet, relinquishing his mouthful of Dan's arm.

Dan lowers him down, keeping his arm in place a little longer just to be sure he's not playing possum (overheated skin against his, jagged breathing becoming calm), then hauls him up into a carry.

He's lighter than Dan expected. Lighter than he remembers from the few occasions he'd had to drag him around, more than the lack of suit and trench coat would account for.

"Oh my god, Dan," Laurie says, wide-eyed. She looks like she might laugh any second, or throw up. She licks her lips. "First, I don't think that's gonna stop him, long term. Second, I think you just put yourself at the top of his hit list."

"Lucky for Adrian," Dan says. He's feeling a little sick himself; the adrenaline drains out of him and leaves him shaking. "I, uh. Didn't really think this through. Guess I'll have my hands full when he wakes up." 

Dan lowers Rorschach onto the guest bed. His limbs splay out, and his features are slack and strange. He looks old, gray touching his temples and spattering his stubble, deep frown lines creviced in his face. Dan's heart aches a little, but not as much as his arm does. 

He grimaces. "I guess a tetanus shot is out of the question."

*

The winter morning brings Rorschach around, its cold edge stolen by the window pane and filtered into wan sunlight. He's sweating through his clothes and his head throbs when he moves it. He licks his teeth and tastes blood.

He is angry, and he remembers why. His pulse thunders through him and shakes off the pall of sleep, sharpens the headache. He wants to get up to confront Daniel for his behavior, and then remove himself from the house. He won't have his assistance on this mission, and that is fine. Fine.

But he can't. Not yet. His pounding blood has afflicted him, physically. He turns over and waits for it to subside.

His tongue runs along the scarred ridges inside his cheek. And he thinks.

He means to think about Veidt, but instead he thinks about Daniel's arm, tight around his neck. The taste of Daniel's flesh in his mouth. How he swore in Rorschach's ear. 

Unacceptable. He pushes himself out of the bed and straightens up despite his protesting knees and back. He tries not to look as he tucks the offending part of himself into the waistband of his underwear to stop its unwanted protrusion, then cinches his belt viciously. Mortar dust puffs out of the creases in his shirt as he pulls it on. He buttons it up to the neck, but leaves it untucked. 

Daniel is waiting for him on the landing. He's standing with his back against the banister, head down and eyes closed, his arms crossed against his chest. His glasses are folded in one hand. He could be dozing, but Rorschach knows that he is not.

A red welt is raised on his arm: a crescent of bruising around freshly-scabbed teeth marks. Something unpleasant stirs in Rorschach's gut. He clenches his jaw and strides past.

"I shouldn't have been able to take you down that easily," Daniel says. "We're getting old."

That stops Rorschach short, one foot on the top stair. He keeps his temper in check, for now. Daniel knows he is leaving, and is just goading him to keep him here, buying time so he can stuff him full of whatever excuses he's cooked up. "Speak for yourself," he says.

Daniel grins, though he looks far too tired for it to contain any humor. Rorschach wonders if he's slept. Probably not. He is still barefoot and in the same clothes.

"You're getting old," he repeats. "I'm out of shape. And Ozymandias could always wipe the floor with both of us with one hand tied behind his back."

He's too predictable for Rorschach to be disappointed. "Maybe you underestimate me," he says, though he knows Daniel has never been that foolish.

Daniel shakes his head. He unfolds his glasses, andpinches the bridge of his nose before putting them on. "Killing Adrian won't help anything. Getting killed by Adrian won't help anything, either."

"Have to try," Rorschach says. "Don't expect you to understand."

"Bullshit. You know I understand. But then what?" Daniel turns, rests his elbows on the banister. His gaze is sharp behind his glasses, but Rorschach sees the desperation in it. "If you succeed, then what? Where does that leave you? Where does it leave the rest of the world?"

This is where Rorschach has yet to work out the fine details. All he knows is that he has to do the right thing. "Justice will be done," he insists.

"Justice for who?" Daniel pushes. "Not for anyone still alive, that's for sure."

He can tell that Daniel knows he is deflecting, and is preparing to seize on that. His frustration with the conversation reaches a hard limit. He sets to the stairs; he has more important things to deal with than this clumsy manipulation. 

"Things are getting _better_ ," Daniel calls after him, leaning into the void of the stairwell. Rorschach can hear the anger, finally. "Don't do this. Rorschach!"

*

Laurie feels the mattress shift under Dan as he sits. She rolls over and reaches up to stroke his back. He swears under his breath. 

"He took it pretty well," she says, still a little throaty with the hour or two of sleep she managed to grab. "For him."

Dan gives her a little chuckle. It's thin, but it's better than a sigh. 

"You really think he'll go through with it?" She knows the answer, of course. He's a crazy asshole and this kind of over-the-top retribution is just his flavor.

"Oh, yeah. He'll try." Dan rolls onto the bed and goes to tuck his arms around her. She gives him a quick squeeze and slips out from between the sheets. She can see the hurt on his face in her peripheral vision as she pulls on a battered pair of jeans, and steels herself.

"About time I got going downtown," she says.

"Laurie..."

"Listen," she says, tugging her hair back into a ponytail. The blonde bob doesn't stay tamed as easily as her old haircut; she smooths back the flyaway strands in irritation. Her kingdom for some hair pins. "Not two weeks ago you were wallowing in some hardcore grief, and then last night he was chewing on your arm while you choked him unconscious. I think you have some things to work through with him, and I think it's better that I'm not in the middle of it."

Dan pales. His voice has a panicky cast to it. "You're leaving? Laurie, please—"

"No! Oh, no. Dan, honey." She sits back down on the mattress, catches his face between her palms. "I love you, okay. But things aren't really right between us, and seeing you and him last night, I think I get why. Kinda." She kisses him, tries to imbue it with reassurances. "Sort your shit out with him, then get back to me, okay?" 

He catches her wrist, keeps her when she tries to stand. "I don't know how," he admits, quietly. He doesn't want to look her in the face, and her heart breaks a little. His palm is hot, sweating. "I mean, Christ. It's Rorschach."

"Yeah, no kidding." She pauses a moment, wondering at her judgment, then says, "I'll talk to him."

"About..."

"About his stupid-ass plan. I doubt he'll listen to me, but I'll try." She strokes his cheek with the back of her hand. "You gotta deal with the rest, though. I'm not touching that with a ten-foot-pole, no offense."

*

The nearest soup kitchen is eight blocks away, towards the center of Manhattan. Rorschach left Dan's place not too long before Laurie did, and she'd bet her bottom dollar that the breadline is his first stop. She picks up into a light jog, taking it easy on the ruptured sidewalk; a sprained ankle would not be good times.

Veidt's dirigibles drone overhead. Most are utility-class, but some are advertising _Millennium_.

The closer to downtown she gets, the worse the ground under her twists and heaves, and when she's warmed up enough she drops back to a brisk walk. The buildings get more and more wretched, too; all blasted-out windows and ply battened over the doorways. But they're standing. That's more than can be said for the the gaping, slimy pit that used to be Penn Plaza, and anything in a quarter-mile radius around it. The crop circle, they call it these days. She doesn't want to remember the visceral horror she felt when Jon had teleported them there, right to ground zero moments after it happened. Blood. Bodies. Tandoori to go.

No, she doesn't want to remember it at all, but it's suddenly impossible not to, superimposed over the neighborhood like a psychedelic nightmare. She stops to gather herself, knuckles hard at her eyes. Get it together, Laurel Jane. Fuck's sake.

A familiar figure catches her attention when she looks back up, dusty copper hair against the gray of the street. Bingo.

She trails Rorschach for a while, partly curious about where he's going, partly to see how long she can get away with it. To her surprise, he doesn't seem to notice her. He seems pretty distracted in general, eyes down on the sidewalk instead of watching his surroundings, and Laurie wonders if his fight with Dan has affected him after all.

He loops around a tenement block that has sheared almost in two, dirty brick spilling down into the street, bent rebar protruding like knifehandles from the guts of the building. Laurie hangs back, watching as he tests the fire escape on the more intact half of the tenement, hauls himself up to the third floor, then disappears through a smashed window.

She counts to thirty, and when he doesn't reappear, she follows.

*

She waits on the sill, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom of the apartment. If she was in any doubt, she recognizes it as Rorschach's place from the lurid news footage released after his arrest. It's suffered further under the neighborhood's subsidence; everything has slid to one side of the room, drifts of old newspaper and empty tin cans piled up against the far wall. Some of the floorboards have buckled and popped up, jagged like stalagmites. It smells as though a sewer pipe's ruptured somewhere.

Rorschach himself is hunched over the kitchenette sink, shoulders heaving. For an embarrassing second it sounds like he's crying—she thinks: shit, how the hell do I deal with _this_ —but then his body spasms and he makes an awful retching noise. 

"Jeez," she mutters, and slips into the room. 

He hears her, and his posture stiffens. His breathing sounds thick and phlegmy. He coughs and spits into the sink.

"Hey, you alright?" She ventures closer, picking around the garbage on the floor. "Rorschach?"

He makes one of those weird noises that don't mean anything. Not to her, anyway. His hands are balled into fists against the scrappy countertop and for the first time she notices the mask oozing from between his white-knuckled grip.

He turns, and his eyes are bloodshot. He wipes his nose on his sleeve. There is something acutely vulnerable about the gesture, and Laurie's not sure how to navigate this strange territory. Now is probably not a good time to push him on his plan for Veidt.

"Dan needs to talk to you about something," she says instead, invoking his name in the hopes it'll make things less weird.

Rorschach sniffs and rubs his nose again. He shrugs off the shirt he's wearing, wipes his face with it. Then he crouches by the breached floorboards to hook something out of the floor cavity. It's a trench coat, and there is a large bloodstain spattered across the front of it. "Already spoke to him," he says. His voice has a deeper rasp than usual, emotion rattling freely. "This morning."

"Yeah, um," she says. "Not about that."

He's fumbling with the belt, pulling it into a tight knot. He freezes for a moment. "No," he says, and then briefly paces back and forth, hands working at his mask. She wonders why he hasn't put it on, why he keeps just turning it over and over. "Nothing to more to talk about."

"He came back to look for you," she says, temper flaring despite her best efforts. She knew that all along, really, but it still frustrates her for reasons she can't pin down. "You at least owe him an apology."

"Laurie." 

It's the first time she's heard him speak her real name and not some exacting, formal address. It makes him seem less of a prick. It also makes her uncomfortable, then a little sad. He looks a mess, mouth twitching as he tries and fails to keep a blank expression on his face. His brows knit. 

"What do I do," he says, and heaves in a shuddering breath, and another.

Oh. He's having some kind of a breakdown. Fantastic.

She wonders if she should try and reassure him somehow. She remembers a National Geographic article she read once, about rangers who looked after injured animals on some African savanna. Moving slowly, she extends a hand and gives him the chance to back away. She's so far out of her depth here it's not even funny. 

"Can't be responsible," he says. He's shaking when she puts a hand on his shoulder. He doesn't seem to notice. He's turned inwards, caught in his despair. "Don't want to keep Veidt's secrets for him. Don't want to reignite war. Impossible situation. What do I do." 

"I don't know," Laurie tells him. It's the simple truth, and the pangs of sympathy are coming hard and fast, now. She can barely stomach the situation herself; it must be one hell of a moral quandary for someone so staunchly black-and-white. All she can come up with are platitudes. "But you can get through it. Come on, let's go home."

He moves toward the window, alarmingly docile under her hands, and for an instant she's convinced that he's going to jump.

*

"Did I break him?" Dan says, scrubbing his hands through his hair. He hasn't stood still since she came back with Rorschach drifting in her wake. "I've never seen him like that. Never. Not even... that time."

"Mm, no. I don't think it was you." Laurie's sitting cross-legged on the bed, still in her jeans. Rorschach's mask is stuffed in the front pocket of her hoodie. He'd handed it to her before they'd hit the basement, suddenly unwilling to be in possession of it. The man himself stumbled into the guest room without complaint. "I think everything just sunk in all at once," she says, and shrugs.

"Yeah, I guess. I guess we've had time to, I don't know, process a little."

Laurie pulls her hoodie off over her head, separates out the mask and tosses it onto the nightstand. "I don't think that helped, either. He's a pretty messed up guy, huh."

"Yeah. He's only gotten worse, over the years." Dan looks over his glasses at her. "You're very interested in his well-being all of a sudden. I thought you couldn't stand him." 

"Can't say I _like_ him, but he's your friend, I guess."

"I guess." Dan offers her a lopsided smile. "Even I'm not sure if I like him, sometimes."

"Go figure. I always thought he was a creepy asshole. It was kinda hard to remember he was even human sometimes, with that goddamn thing on his face. Made him easy to hate." She sighs, kicks out of her jeans even though it's only early afternoon. Fuck the rest of today. "Having trouble reconciling that with the guy puking into his sink and crying, you know?"

Dan just looks stricken. She bites at her lower lip and tries to soften that up a little.

"Hey, you know, people thought the same about Jon. About not being human, I mean. Wow, I'm sorry, it sucks when people talk like that about someone you—"

"Yeah," Dan says, abruptly.

She's suddenly sick of talking about this. Her eyes hurt and she wants to close them. She yawns, long and loud and a little too exaggerated. "Jeez, today's lasted at least a week."

"It's been rough," Dan says. He's usually so earnest; it unnerves her when he's unreadable. "I'll be downstairs if you need anything."

*

Time slips away from Dan in short order, his day abbreviated by drained emotions and the dark winter hours. Once sundown softens into twilight, there's not enough light to do anything useful, but at least he manages to clean the stringy goo out of his refrigerator.

The leather of his sofa is matted with a layer of dust. It smells musty, with an undernote of that strange greasy tang that covers everything in the city. Dan doesn't bother wiping it down, just places his glasses on the floor next to the sofa leg, lowers his aching body onto the cushions and curls up, waiting for it to warm against his skin.

He's tired beyond sleep. He lies and stares into the dark and wills himself to pass out. Every time he feels himself drifting, his mind turns to Laurie, at the new understanding in her voice. Or to Rorschach, and the bright pain of teeth.

His thoughts become muddled, then nonsensical. He sleeps.

*

He wakes a little while later. There's someone standing next to him in the dark. Dan can't exactly see him the the pitch black, but can sense a familiar presence, a displacement of shadows.

"Rorschach," he says, voice cracking. His mouth is dry. All the dust, probably.

"Daniel."

"Are you. Are you feeling better?"

"No," Rorschach says. His voice is papery, shallow. "Why are you down here."

Dan goes to sit up, but slumps back. His arm is numb where he's slept on it. It's cold when he shifts over, so he stays nestled in the warmed couch cushions. "I only have one guest room," he says.

Rorschach seems to find the answer acceptable enough, but doesn't leave.

"Can I, uh." Dan clears his throat. "Is there something you want?"

A low noise in the affirmative. "Miss Juspeczyk said you wanted to talk to me."

Yes, but maybe not at some ungodly hour in the morning, he doesn't say out loud, because he doesn't actually want Rorschach to leave. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, and tries to gather his thoughts. 

"Said I owe you an apology," Rorschach continues, before Dan can get a handle on what he wants to say. "Said you came looking for me."

"Yeah," Dan says. He feels shaky all at once, lit like he's had too much caffeine. The sofa cushion next to his head shifts. Rorschach is leaning on it, leaning over Dan. "Yeah, I did. But you found me first."

He reaches his hand out into the dark. It finds Rorschach's collarbone. His thumb comes to rest in the hollow of his throat, and he feels Rorschach swallow. He isn't sure what to make of this. 

Still, he has things to say. Long-stagnant air to clear.

"I just wanted say something I should have said a long time ago." 

("You ever miss it?" Hollis had asked. "No," he'd replied, and fooled neither of them.)

"I'm sorry I quit on you." It doesn't feel good to excise the wound, even after the way it's infected both of their lives for so long. Too deep to be bloodless. He's afraid that this will make a mess. "I thought I was doing the right thing—still don't know either way for sure, but I know you were disappointed in me."

"Bitterly," Rorschach says, but he doesn't sound it, not any more. 

The upholstery creaks, and Dan feels Rorschach's breath on his face. He smells rank, but not much worse than anyone else these days. Their foreheads bump. This is strange behavior from him, but then Dan is reminded viscerally of back in '66 when they put Big Figure away, how when it was over Rorschach had grabbed the back of his neck and brought their heads together, just like this, except then he had been fierce in the joy of their victory. Not subdued by Dan's failure.

It's a memory he returned to often in his bed. One of his ways of enduring the insomniac nights that visited him after Keene.

He starts at a light touch on his arm. There's nothing he can do about the goosebumps that raise in the wake of Rorschach's blunt fingers, or at the way his pulse quickens. He hisses as those fingers press over the wound in his forearm.

"Sorry about this." His voice is low and rough, so close to Dan's ear. "Was angry."

This is too much. Dan curls his fingers against Rorschach's neck, and he doesn't pull away. He should be pulling away, appalled. Instead he's there, warm, solid. Being contrite. "God," Dan mutters. "You're really not okay, are you."

He sits up, brings his hands to Rorschach's shoulders to steady him. Rorschach bows his head, rests his forehead against Dan's shoulder. "I don't know," he says through clenched teeth. 

I don't know what to do, he'd told Laurie, holding his mask. He didn't even try to put it on, she said.

Oh, hell.

"Listen," Dan says, and hesitates. He's not sure if this is the right tack to take, but it's obvious that Rorschach has been stripped of some essential element and is suffering for the loss. "I overheard a couple medics talking last time we were down clearing the rubble. They've had some trouble with their drug supplies being ransacked."

He feels Rorschach tense under his hands, a slight turn of his head. Questioning.

"Painkillers and 'ludes gone, mostly. I know, it'd hardly be worth the effort back in the day, but there are a hell of a lot more people who need them now. Pretty scummy to leave them suffering like that."

"Yes," Rorschach says.

"Maybe we should check it out?" Dan prompts.

"Hrrrm. Probably small timers, selling them on. Big demand. Opportunistic racketeering, vultures picking over starving bones of city. Reprehensible."

He sounds so much like himself that Dan wants to smile, so he does unabashedly, hidden by the dark. A frisson of relief prickles across his scalp. It turns into a full-body shiver as Rorschach straightens up, one hand lingering on Dan's arm. 

"Daniel." A quick, uncertain inhale, and Rorschach clasps at his wrist with both hands, then slides his fingers around Dan's in a semblance of a handshake. "Glad you're alive. Felt... depressed. When I heard otherwise." His fingers twitch convulsively. 

Dan squeezes back, working on the tightness in his throat and at the pressure that feels like it wants to be a sob. "Get some sleep," he manages, but that's not what he meant to say at all.

*

"Excuse me." Dan sets his face in a mild, amiable smile and approaches an aid worker in military fatigues, his hi-vis jacket stark in the gray morning drizzle. Relief effort volunteers labor in the collapsed surroundings; Rorschach is among them, keeping a low profile.

The shifts are kept short, this close to the crop circle. Laurie can already feel the cold sweat breaking out, the nasty, cruel notions that subtly insinuate themselves between the thoughts in her head.

She stands at Dan's shoulder, arms braced in the small of her back, a grimace on her face. It's not completely genuine, but she's worn the real thing enough times for it to be convincing. The full-body ache from hoisting masonry around definitely helps.

"Excuse me," Dan says again, and this time the aid worker notices him. He looks tired, with a thousand-yard stare and grime that has settled into the lines of his face. "My, uh, my wife hurt her back pretty bad moving some rubble, you know if she can get something for the pain?"

Laurie mewls a little, just for show. Her mother would be so proud of her acting.

The worker shakes his head and wipes some grit out of his stubble. "That kinda thing is in tight supply. Unless you're..." His expression lifts suddenly, the tension in his jaw alleviated by curiosity. "Hey, don't I know you from somewhere?" Shit. He's looking right at her, eyebrows knitted, trying to connect some dot or other.

Dan glances sideways at her, panic usurping his inane smile.

"Uh, maybe?" she says. Shit shit shit. "Umm. I was a model, before. Perfume ads? Maybe you saw..."

"No, I _do_ know you. You're Laurie Jupiter. You're hair's different, but I recognize you." The man glances at Dan then back at Laurie, clears his throat. "My daughter was a fan," he says, and smiles, quick but unsteady. "When she was a kid."

"Okay," Dan says. "Thanks for your help, but we should be going now." Laurie feels him grip her arm, begins to walk them backwards. 

"Hey," the worker holds his hands up, palms out, calming. They must look spooked. "You know they've stopped the APBs on you guys, pretty much. No need to freak out."

"Pretty much?" Laurie says. Dan's hand is still tight on her arm. She pats it gently and he loosens up a touch.

"Well, some cops've still got a grudge." The worker shrugs. "But it's not like you're above the fold any more."

They stand in uncomfortable silence for a moment. Laurie can feel the man's eyes on her.

"Look," he says, finally. "Some asshole's had their sticky fingers in the medkits, but maybe I can do something for you. I'd hate to have tell my daughter that I couldn't help the Silk Spectre." He raises his eyebrows at Dan. "And, Nite Owl, I guess?"

Dan sighs and runs a hand through his hair.

"Okay, listen up," Laurie says. She tilts her hip, rests a hand on her waist and flashes the man the sweetest smile she can muster. She leans in to read the ID on his lanyard. "Carver. I'll be straight with you. I don't need the painkillers. We were just fishing for info."

Carver doesn't look surprised, or much of anything at all. Laurie wonders how long he's been on shift. He looks brittle enough to snap.

"Rumor gets around," Dan says. He's looking over the site, at Rorschach trying to shift a chunk of concrete and rebar. He drops it when he notices Dan, and starts making his way over. "And old habits die hard. We want to help."

*

The basement is cold, and the emergency bulkhead lights makes shadows slink and crawl in the corners. There's a void in the heart of the place. Daniel had to leave the Archimedes in Antarctica; his loss showed keenly on his face as he explained, and Rorschach had to look away.

"Didn't trust him," Rorschach grumbles. He's resting against one of Daniel's workbenches. He used to stand here often, back when they were partners. He was hoping it would bring clarity, somehow reignite the conviction that has evaporated from him, but he knows it's just baseless ritual.

His future feels limited. He can't conceive of where he will be in a month; a week.

"You don't trust anyone," Laurel says, descending from the top of the basement stairs. She is wearing her uniform, but has augmented it with dark pants and her steel-toed workboots. 

"That's not true." Daniel has his head in a locker, digging around for something. "Is it, buddy?"

"No," Rorschach says.

He still doesn't know how he feels about the talk he had with Daniel. Everything has an unexpected edge to it, and he is having trouble remembering his boundaries. He regrets touching him. He wishes he had touched him more. He is concerned that he can't easily differentiate these feelings.

"Ah, here it is." Daniel pulls out a ballistic vest. "I knew I had one of these someplace."

"Awesome. Thanks, Dan." Laurel shrugs it on, pulling it over the licentious gossamer of her uniform. Then, to Rorschach: "Okay, he was kinda off, but I think he was legit. Just feeling the effects of too much alien... stuff."

The vest flattens her breasts when she pulls the velcro tight around her. She looks formidable, and Rorschach approves, grudgingly. Much more effective protection. Makes her look like a warrior. A soldier, not a—

"Hey. Rorschach." Daniel says. From his tone, it's not the first time he's said it. Rorschach gives himself a mental shake.

Daniel is holding something out to him. A hat, one he must have left here decades ago. Yes, he remembers—there's a bullet hole in the brim. He recalls the walk home, cruel winter air lying cold on his scalp, scouring away the memory of Daniel's hands smoothing over his masked head, checking despite his protests. _Please, just let me be sure. Jesus, I didn't realize it was that close—_

He takes it and pokes a finger through the hole. When he looks up at Daniel, he's already turned away to suit up.

Laurel is at his shoulder, is holding his face out to him. "Sure you're up to this?" she asks, when he hesitates to take it from her.

He nods and jerks it from her grasp more sharply than he intended. He spreads it over his palm, and the ink pulses and shudders. His stomach does the same. He has judged himself by his own measure and has come up woefully short. There is no longer clarity in black and white. No more relief.

He doesn't know how much longer he can do this. The millions dead, unavenged, are consuming him.

He pulls the mask over his face.

*

Carver had directed them to the east of the city, to a temporary first aid station in the library on Madison. It's the only one around the ground zero perimeter that hasn't been targeted yet. There are other stations in the crop circle—a high density of them, in fact—but the perimeter is locked down before dusk, high security fences lashed together in an immense circle around the shattered edges of the site. 

It would take more than a handful of pills for a sane man to venture there after dark.

The last shreds of the acidic sunset fade into blackness, and Rorschach finds he is at a disadvantage. Visibility is extremely poor in this part of the city. It is less habitable, so there is nobody to hang storm lanterns.

Daniel has his night-vision goggles, and Laurel acquired an older pair for herself. Rorschach finds himself stumbling in the dark.

"You okay, there?" Daniel asks. Rorschach can sense his proximity, the hand hovering uncertainly near his upper arm. He grunts in response, neither confirming nor denying.

He feels Laurel flank him. Her shoulder brushes his. "Not far now," she tells him. "There's a storefront opposite the library entrance. It's got a flat roof and a balcony where we can stake out."

Rorschach nods. He lets them guide him, the press of their shoulders an anchor in the bottomless night. They climb a drift of rubble against the store wall, the bricks rocking under his feet, and Daniel boosts them both up the rest of the way to the balcony railing. Rorschach hears his grunt of effort as he tries to pull himself up and over. 

He slings an arm over the edge of the railing, feels Daniel clasp his wrist. "Out of shape," Rorschach remarks as he hauls him up. 

"Yeah, told you." Daniel half-laughs, panting, grip still tight on Rorschach's wrist as he straddles the ironwork. "Well, upper body's pretty good still, just got more weight to deal with."

"Shh." Laurel is a little distance away from them, maybe leaning over the railing. "Settle down, boys."

"Yes, ma'am." Daniel's grip slackens, but doesn't fall away; he moves his hand up to Rorschach's shoulder. They walk, eleven paces, and then there's brickwork at his back. He hunkers down, feels Daniel slide down the wall to crouch next to him.

"Like coming home," Daniel murmurs, and Rorschach's heart clenches like a fist.

*

Dan comes to take over her watch after an hour or so. He rests his elbows on the railing next to her, looks out over the street below.

"Still all quiet," she says.

He rolls his shoulders, a blur of green in her night vision. "Night's young." 

"So," Laurie says, and then lapses into silence. He hasn't talked to her about Rorschach, but she can tell something's gone down between them; the shift in tension is subtle but noticeable. Difficult to say what's going on, exactly, but at least nobody's bleeding this time.

"It didn't really help," Dan says, voice pitched barely above a whisper. "Talking to him. I'm, uh, kinda more confused than I was before, to be honest."

"What happened?" 

"I don't know," he says, then shrugs. "Talked about a couple things. I guess that part helped a bit, but—"

He seems hesitant, almost embarrassed. "Dan?"

"But then he touched me. I mean. Not like, like _that_ , just, here." He turns her arm, runs his fingers lightly down the inside of it. She shivers at the sensation of it through her uniform, and there's a flutter in her chest when she thinks about Rorschach doing that to Dan, voluntarily. On his bare skin.

She turns, steps into his space. His cape billows around them in the wintery air.

"Laurie, god. I'm sorry. I—you know that I love you. You know that I want to be with you. But—"

She lifts onto her toes, pulls him down so she can kiss him quiet. Her face feels hot, hands shaky; he responds with a fervor that does nothing to help. "I know," she whispers. "But?"

"God, I want him to, to—" Dan groans into her mouth. His hands are firm on her waist, pulling her close to his body. She remembers Dan's arm around Rorschach's neck, the tight arch of his back as Dan restrained him.

"You want him, too," she says simply. In the periphery of her vision she can see Rorschach, still crouched against the brickwork. If he's heard them, there's no indication.

Dan nods mutely, then makes a tormented little sound as Laurie presses against his thigh. She has no idea why she's getting off on this, whether it's the tougher edge to her costume or Dan's repressed longing or the idea that Rorschach is _right there_ —

"Damn," Dan gasps, and moves away from her, turns to the railing. He takes in a deep gulp of air. "Sorry. Look, down there."

Shit. She leans over, spies movement in the doorway of the library. Four of them, in fatigues, and it looks like she and Dan aren't the only ones with night-vision. "Military?" she says.

Down in the street, they jostle one another, and one of them barks a laugh.

"Hrm." Rorschach, to her left. She glances at him in trepidation, but the ink in his mask shifts smoothly, unperturbed. "Seems unlikely. Careless. Undisciplined."

"I guess it's not just drugs they've been swiping." Dan says. "They might be armed. Be careful, both of you."

Laurie pats the taser on her hip, smiles wickedly at Dan. He's watching Rorschach, though, and the tight arch of his body as he vaults over the railing.

*

The cloudcover is on the move overhead, buffeted along by the rising wind. A quarter-moon glints between the shredded clouds, just enough ambiance for Rorschach's eyes to focus in the dark; not quite enough to see clearly.

He strides towards the library doors. Daniel and Laurel are approaching on his right. She stands at his shoulder, but Daniel passes them. Rorschach hears him address their suspects.

Their derisive mocking is tiresome in its predictability. The more things change—

"Go," Laurel whispers, just as Rorschach hears the snap and flutter of Nite Owl's cape, the shouts of a fight in its early stages, when intimidation and bravado would still be useful for such scum, if they were facing anybody else. 

He scythes into the first solid body he encounters, fists raised. The first landed blow brings him no satisfaction, the grunt of pain is ugly to his ears instead of gratifying. He anticipates the returning swing, ducks outside of the man's range, barely. His hat is knocked to the sidewalk.

He should aim low, bring this reprobate down with a gut punch, twist his arm behind his back until he squeals. 

And then what.

Cops already have their hands full. They'll be back out on the street inside of a day. Futile, this. He jerks his head to the side, evades a punch to his face by an inch; it strikes his ear, makes it burn hot.

It is not mercy that makes him lower his guard. His head swims, nausea roils in his stomach. He cannot be the arbiter of justice, not with what he has already conceded. The hypocrisy of it would be unendurable. He can barely stand to wear his face.

An elbow lands heavily in the middle of his back and his knees buckle, bright pain under the impact of the sidewalk. He tries to right himself, is smashed back down onto his hands and knees. Bad, he should be thinking. Very bad. Should pull himself together.

He doesn't.

A hand wraps itself into the back of his trench coat, pulls him backwards and off-balance; he can't seem to get his feet under him. His heart is hammering through his ribcage, the air he's sucking through the mask is thin, insufficient. Shapes collapse across his vision.

There is a metallic click, and the cold muzzle of a pistol presses into his neck.

He goes very still. For the first time in days, his mind is calm.

Fingers gather his mask at the top of his head, drag it off. There are bright pinpricks of pain as individual hairs are caught on the clinging material. The winter air stings his skin as it is revealed by inches. The gun caresses the shell of his ear.

He can hear Daniel, shouting.

His face is dripping. Not all of it is sweat. He realizes there is no way back, nor forward, from here. His voice is broken when he speaks, barely recognizable as his own when he addresses his deliverer.

"Well? What are you waiting for?"

*

Laurie tasers the punk in the back of the neck. 

He goes down messily, his wild spasms squeezing off a shot that sends an echo cracking around the neighborhood. Rorschach is a graceless slump against the wall.

Dan's shaking as he descends over him, grabs at the lapels of his coat, his jaw, turns his head towards him. He's half sure it's all over, that Laurie didn't intervene in time and he's going to find blood and shattered—

Somber brown eyes stare at him, unblinking, but wet with life.

"Jesus," Dan groans, and gives him a little shake. "I thought that you. I thought you—"

Rorschach rolls his head back against the brickwork, closes his eyes. His face contorts, and for an instant Dan is seeing a history of pain, struggle held in his clenched teeth and hardship in the lines of his face, residue of a hard-fought life.

Dan leans in and doesn't really kiss him, just shares in his messy desperation and vulnerability with open-mouthed, unsteady breathing. His heart won't stop trip-hammering, caught in a moment of terror and unable to let go of it, not yet.

Rorschach clenches his fist in Dan's cloak, pulls him closer for long enough that it can't have been a mistake, then pushes him away again, makes overtures towards getting up. Laurie crouches beside him, helps as he uses Dan, and the wall, to hoist himself to his feet.

"Why did you do that?" she asks him, but there's no reprimand in her voice, just shock and incredulity and a guarded relief. He seems unmoved as she hugs him, but sways when she moves away, and Dan is caught by the way he leans himself against her arm, finds a tenderness welling up to finally displace the fear.

Dan stands on his other side, braces an arm around him and locks hands with Laurie, moves them step after stumbling step back to the brownstone.

*

Laurie had pried Rorschach's mask from the punk's grasp, and dumped it unceremoniously on the hallway bureau when they got in. Dan makes a note to move it someplace Rorschach won't come across it unexpectedly. 

Everyone has something that holds power over them, and he's been in thrall to that thing for far too long. He's let it blot out the man beneath, all nuance struck from his worldview.

Dan's pretty sure it's what almost killed him tonight.

He's sleeping now, in Dan's bed. He came in here of his own accord, then collapsed against the mattress like a condemned building. Laurie is curled at his back, and Dan hasn't the energy to wonder what to make of that. 

He's not jealous. Even if he were, he's not sure which one of them he's supposed to be jealous of. Instead, he's just glad that they're both here. He sits on the edge of the mattress and watches them sleep until he can't keep his eyes open any longer, then folds himself into their slumber.

*

The house is empty when he wakes up. Quiet. He finds a note on his nightstand: _Didn't want to wake you,_ it says in Laurie's oversized scrawl, then an address on tenth. _don't panic, i got him with me. xx_

*

This morning there's a persistent drizzle of gray rain that fogs the air and damps Laurie's hair to her forehead, but the wind is still and the work keeps her warm.

On her left, there's a neat stack of reclaimed bricks; on her right, the slumped remains of a building. She grabs a brick from the heap, chops at the mortar with a trowel that is misshapen almost beyond recognition, then adds the clean brick to the stack. The strike of her trowel rings clear into the morning air, rhythmic, like a bell tolling.

She's been here in the park since the thin light of dawn and her wrist and arms and back ache, but it's satisfying work. A little order in the entropy that surrounds them. 

"He's a hard nut to crack," she says, the next time she straightens up. "I barely got a word out of him the whole way here." She beds her trowel into the pile of masonry so she can give Dan a hug.

"Is he okay?" Dan asks, squeezing back, then obviously considers himself a complete idiot for asking. 

Laurie gives him a sympathetic grin. "The sixty-four-thousand dollar question," she says. Rorschach hadn't offered her any explanation as to what happened last night, and she hadn't asked. She seems to have not asked him a whole bunch of stuff in the short time they've been thrown together. At some point her unstoppable force is going to have to meet his immovable object. "I don't think he's gonna hurl himself to his doom, though, if that's what you mean."

"Huh?"

Laurie nods towards the church over the road, at Rorschach perched halfway up the roof, nailing down tile battens with an intensity that is clearly alarming to nearby volunteers.

"Oh, shit," Dan says, and she can practically see his heart leap into his throat. He starts towards the building, eyes fixed on the roofline. 

She catches his wrist. "He's been up there for hours," she tells him. "He's okay, for now. Here, take over for a bit, I think my arm's going to fall off." She dislodges her trowel, hands it to him handle-first.

He takes it from her, and she sits for a while in companionable silence, just watching as his big hands heft the bricks like they're nothing. He looks up at her often. She waits for him.

"Things just keep getting more complicated," he says, finally. He doesn't look up this time, just hacks at a particularly stubborn chunk of mortar.

"No shit," she says. "But I figure we can work something out."

Dan stops whaling on the brick, eyebrows raised. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, me and you. And, you and him."

Dan just looks at her. He's either a little lost or being willfully innocent.

"Sharing is caring?" she tries. "If you love someone, let them fuck their partner? Stop me when you get the picture."

"Jeez, Laurie," Dan says, and then seems to lose his thread under the heap of embarrassment she just dumped on him. His cheeks turn a pink that has nothing to do with the bitter weather. "And... him and you?" he ventures.

"Well, let's not get too crazy," she says, ignoring for now the curiosity that's tugging at her libido. The guy remains pretty gross in a whole bunch of ways, even if she does have a softer spot than she used to. She grins. "Still, wouldn't be the weirdest relationship I've been in."

Dan sighs, drops the brick to run a hand through his hair. "He tried to get himself killed last night," he says with a bluntness that takes all the excitement out of things. He's not chiding her, she knows. He's just more willing to deal with it than she is. "I really need to talk to him about that, first."

*

The volunteer force thins out as midday approaches, until it is only him left, perched at the top of the world. There is nothing else, just him and his hammer and a mouthful of clout nails, wide gray sky above him and wide gray city below. It is orderly and predicable and he is helping.

The calm of last night pervades. He doesn't know much about himself any more, but he does know that he's ambivalent about his continued existence. 

He hears someone climbing the roof ladder. When he looks over, it is Daniel. He expected this; he saw him talking to Laurel before, down below. 

He greets him with a nod. Then he says, "Daniel," around the nails between his teeth. It's easier to speak it when he can't feel the name on his tongue. It makes it harder to remember his mouth, desperate, the night before. 

"Hey," Daniel says, settling across the apex of the roof and closing his eyes briefly. He did the same when he first climbed up; the exposure and brisk wind reminding him of vertiginous patrol nights. "Rorschach?"

"Not sure," he responds, and hammers a nail home. This is the last batten.

"...Walter?" Daniel asks. His voice is tentative, like a touch in the dark. He is half-surprised that Daniel knows, and remembered, and at the same time it is entirely unsurprising that he did. He doesn't like how intimate it is. He wants to hear him say it again.

He is getting used to resolving the conflicting attitudes that live within him, but only a little.

"Maybe," he says.

"So," Daniel offers an uncertain grin. "Is this you, now? Rorschach the roofer, scourge of the underfelt?"

A joke. Good. He will return in kind. "Have experience hitting things." He'd like to demonstrate, but there's nothing left to fix down. Maybe he will learn how to slate a roof next.

Daniel moves a little closer to him. He doesn't shimmy along the ridge nervously like most of the other volunteers. He stands, feet confident against the battens he has nailed down. Daniel is as at home up here as Rorschach—as Kovacs is.

"I need to know you're okay," Daniel says. He looks earnest, which is the worst expression he has. Rorschach can barely stand to look at it. Walter has no chance.

Kovacs takes the nails out of his mouth and drops them. He watches them as they roll down the felt and ping off the edge of the building to the ground below, glinting before they vanish. "Not dead, yet," he says. "Will endure."

Daniel is searching his face for a lie. He reaches out to hold Kovacs' wrist. His hand is warm, anchoring. He wonders if Daniel can feel the escalation of his pulse.

"Promise me," Daniel says.

The hair on the back of his neck prickles. He looks Daniel in the eye, and doesn't make any promises he can't keep.

*

Laurie makes her way back home as the sun sets. At the end of their street, a crew has been at work: a big chunk of the blacktop has been cut away to expose the water main. Soon, she thinks with anticipation. Running water. Showers. Unprecedented luxury.

In the brownstone, she takes the time she has alone to strip naked and wash herself down with a pan of water. The towels she had stolen from the motels half a lifetime ago are gray and matted, rough with the meager hand-washing they've received. It's a little like rubbing herself with cardboard, but it's always a relief to get the day's grime off her skin. 

Upstairs, she opens one of Dan's drawers on a whim, hoping that the mythical and elusive clean underwear fairy has visited.

Rorschach's mask stares back at her. She sits on the edge of the bed and plucks it out of the drawer. The ink shudders to life under her hands, converging around her fingertips. It's pretty neat. Jon made this fabric, she remembers. 

She slides her thumb inside it, opening the hole, and gingerly gives it a sniff. Kind of musky, but the smell of the latex mostly overpowers everything else. She holds the mask for a moment, stretched out between her hands.

This is probably some kind of desecration, she thinks. And that's probably why I'm going to put it on.

"Weeeeird," she informs the room. Everything gets darker when the ink drifts over her eyes, and her peripheral vision is seriously impaired. How Rorschach didn't get himself killed pretty much immediately is something she'll never understand. 

She breathes a little faster, blowing the air out of her mouth, just to make the patterns move around more. 

"Oh," Dan says, from the bedroom doorway.

"Uh, shit," she says, and her heart rate shoots up. Wow. Let's add dampened hearing to the list of cons. "Uhh."

"Oh," he says again. "Oh, uh." Then he pushes her legs apart and stands between them to press close and kiss her, his mouth slipping over the latex. She fumbles at his fly, hands shaking, and she thinks about that time on the couch, but there's no shadow of a mushroom cloud, not any more. 

He gets inside her quickly, and she wraps her legs around his waist just to keep up as he pins her to the bed, driving into her deep and fast. His breath comes in sharp moans and exhales of frustration, his hands vise-like on her hips, and she thinks, god damn that's sweet, but maybe some wires got crossed here.

"Wait," she gasps. He stops straight away and pulls out of her, but she's already there, body greedy for it, back arched against the mattress as she shudders and clenches. She pulls the mask off so she can breathe properly.

When she gets a hold of herself, Dan is standing with his hands over his face, dick at half-mast and still poking out of his pants. He looks ridiculous, so she laughs. He drags his hands down his face and his expression's about as mortified as she expected.

"That was kinda fucked up," he says. "Sorry."

"It was hot," she says, tugging his pants off. She pulls him down onto the bed, pushes him onto his back. "But yeah, mostly fucked up." He's fully hard again after a few strokes, even though she's tossed Rorschach's mask onto the floor. 

"Sorry," he says again.

She straddles him and takes him inside of her again. Aftershocks are still rippling through her, shivering up her spine and into her fingertips. She pulls tight around him. "Very bad, Daniel," she says. "Should be punished."

"Laurie," he says, half disbelieving laugh, half moan. "Jesus." He bucks up into her and she laughs with him and rolls her hips, pins his hands above his head and kisses him when he comes.

*

Kovacs goes out at night, sometimes. He doesn't wear his (mask, face) uniform; instead he safeguards the healing streets incognito. If Daniel knows, he never follows him, and for that Kovacs is grateful. 

He would not like Daniel to know that he patrols close to the crop circle, and that he comes here often. The psychic fallout is faint, so many months later, but it can still draw poison to the surface of Kovacs' mind. 

He can see his weaknesses for what they are: fear, grief, hopelessness. Insecurity of self. He is so tired of them and their persistence, their wearing-down. He lets them accumulate, building and building until he can only just bear it. There was a time where he would swallow these sensations and let them assimilate, run into his veins and through his thoughts, subjugating Kovacs and fueling Rorschach's contempt.

Now he lets go, lets them dissipate into the night, no longer part of him. He nurses the void that remains in their wake, savoring the brief numbness before something new rushes into the vacuum.

*

"It won't last."

Adrian Veidt looks up from the paperwork on his desk. He noticed Rorschach almost immediately on entering his office, flattened between a filing cabinet and a potted fern as though that made him invisible, but decided to let him stand there for a while. 

"Good evening, Rorschach," Adrian says. "I'm surprised it took you this long before you came to see me."

Rorschach steps into the sphere of light cast by Adrian's desk lamp. He looks considerably worse for wear, but then he's always been a little tattered around the edges. The lack of a mask is a small surprise that Adrian finds interesting, if irrelevant. He sits back in his chair, hands neatly arranged on his desk. 

"Had other business to deal with."

Adrian already knows this. It is much easier to have eyes and ears all over the city, these days. "I heard," he says. "I've seen to some additional security measures around the more vulnerable targets. I trust I can leave it to yourself and your, ah, partners, to keep on top of any other little skirmishes."

If Rorschach is concerned about what Adrian knows or grateful for the gesture, he doesn't make any show of it. He leans his hands on the desk, ever the bad cop. "It won't last," he repeats. "Your utopia. Already vermin thronging in the streets."

"My utopia." Adrian laughs, careful to keep any condescension out of it. "If by 'utopia', you mean a world that is intact, if bloody and bruised. Certainly, it won't last. We are human, after all. But by the time we find ourselves on the brink of war again, it's my hope that we'll have the means for a less... extreme resolution."

He meets Rorschach's stare with ease, unruffled. "You're an intelligent man, Mr Kovacs. You understand it wouldn't be prudent to expedite such an event. You're staying with Dan Dreiberg, yes? I can arrange a car for you."

Rorschach straightens up, visibly bristling, either at the threat or at the insulting lack of subtlety in it. "Won't forget what you've done," he growls. "Won't forgive."

"We all have our crosses to bear." Adrian returns to the paperwork on his desk, flicks through a few pages and then looks back up again as if wondering why he's still here.

Rorschach makes a disgusted noise from where he's crouched on his sill like a gargoyle, then disappears into the night. Adrian stands to look out of the window, watching him retreat back into the city. He might yet be a problem, but for now, Adrian is unconcerned.

*

The first signs of spring start to push through cracks in the sidewalk, bindweed twining its way over the cleared lots, doing its best to overrun Manhattan with its simple white flowers. It's still raining more than not, but the sleety downpours have transmuted into milder showers. Laurie's out in one right now, smoking her pipe on the front stoop as the sun goes down.

Tomorrow, Dan thinks, stripped to the waist at the bathroom sink. The water's been back on for a week, but intermittently and often laced with gray sludge. There's still no gas, though, so the basin's filled with water boiled on the camp stove. He finishes shaving and pats his face dry.

 _You still got to deal with it, one way or another,_ Laurie tells him, hot against his side, one arm flung over his chest. _You can't pretend forever, you'll go crazy._

He stares at himself in the mirror. Alright. Today. His shirt is damp. He buttons it haphazardly. 

On the hallway landing, he hesitates, then puts one hand on the guest room doorhandle. He guesses he may as well do it now.

The guest room is still mostly impersonal, save for the handful of books that have migrated from Dan's shelves downstairs, but it's cozy, lit up by the sunset. Walter himself is on the bed, trench coat bundled up and propped behind his head so he can read in the last slivers of daylight. He looks up when Dan pushes the door open, hair catching the sun fiercely.

"Can we talk?" Dan says, after a moment.

Walter snaps the book shut and slides it onto the nightstand. "Again?" 

Dan almost leaves it there. He almost says, "hey, never mind," and goes back downstairs to kick and throw things in the Nest. But Walter raises an eyebrow at him, so instead he says, "Sorry, did I reach my quota already?"

He sounds pretty uneven. There's a tightness in his throat.

"What's wrong," Walter asks him, straight away. He doesn't sound alarmed, or even concerned, really, but it's more than he'd ever usually offer, and that in itself makes Dan more nervous. He has been different these past few weeks. 

He seems at peace with himself, and Dan doesn't know if he should be glad or terrified.

Dan sits on the bed next to Walter and tries to buy some time by playing with his shirtsleeves, rolling them up to his elbow. "Nothing," he says. Mostly-healed teethmarks glare up at him. "Nothing, just."

How can he explain to him how it had felt to see him kneel down, and not fight back? He can still hardly stand to think about it, how easily he went, the acceptance in his body language when he was seconds away from getting his brains blown out. 

Why is Dan the one with the scars, and not the man who would have killed him? 

He doesn't know how to put that into words. So instead, he reaches out and presses his fingers behind Rorschach's—behind Walter's ear, firmly, like the barrel of a gun.

He seems to understand. At least, he doesn't manage to hide his nauseous expression fast enough. Then he closes his eyes, and Dan thinks maybe he doesn't understand after all.

Dan digs his fingers in harder.

Every muscle in Walter's body tenses. Dan can feel the flex of his jaw under his hand and can see the tautness of the muscles in his neck. When he clasps his hand over Dan's forearm, he is not steady.

"Wasn't myself," he says.

"I know. Are you," Dan says. His heart is racing. He's not sure if he's angry. He might be. He probably is. His face feels hot, anyway. "And are you, now?"

The hand on his arm relaxes, shifting its grip, and Dan knows a split second before it happens that Rorschach—and it is assuredly Rorschach—is going to put him on the floor. He hits the paisley carpet with as much grace as he can manage and doesn't resist when Rorschach flips him onto his back.

Rorschach straddles his chest, bony knees wedged under Dan's arms. "You tell me," he says. He sounds perfectly controlled but for the way his voice drops out on the last syllable, and the telltale tremor in his arms where they're braced either side of Dan's head.

The dresser mirror reflects the arch of his back.

"It's a pretty convincing show," Dan says. He dares to bring one hand to Rorschach's hip, sliding his thumb under the man's shirt. His skin is hot. His thighs are compressing Dan's ribcage. A thick spike of arousal drives itself into the pit of Dan's stomach.

Rorschach sighs and bows his head. Feeling bold, Dan rolls his shoulders off the floor so he can press his mouth to the base of his throat. The noise he makes vibrates against Dan's lips. 

"Enough," he says, but he doesn't move. 

Dan hooks his arm around his neck; the resistance to it is plenty expected. "C'mon," he murmurs, tugging until Rorschach stops locking his elbows and slumps forward onto Dan's shoulder. He's hard and not even trying to hide it, letting it press against the soft flesh below Dan's sternum. 

"Daniel," Rorschach says, words clipped, but muffled. "Enough."

"Alright." Dan slides the arm from around his neck. "Get off me, then." He's a little disappointed when Rorschach sits up. He can feel the minute shift of the muscles in his legs as if he is going to stand. 

He doesn't.

Rorschach fixes his stare a couple inches to the left of Dan's head. His hands rest palm-down, fingers tensing and relaxing in turn. His chest rises and falls with his breathing, slow and regimented. His thighs shake, almost imperceptibly.

Dan rests his hand over the swell in the front of his pants. Rorschach doesn't flinch; the only acknowledgement of Dan's transgression is a slight hitch to his breath. 

"This what you wanted to talk about?" His voice is rough and unwieldy. He doesn't move Dan's hand away.

"No," Dan says. 

"You're angry at me."

"Kinda."

Rorschach shudders into the touch when Dan slides his fingers firmly over him, and gives a tiny roll of his hips. "This is reprisal."

"No," Dan says, again. His hand falters. "This is my response to seeing you nearly executed in the street." He thumps his head back against the carpet, squeezing his eyes closed until he sees stars. Christ.

"Not how sublimation works," Rorschach says. 

"I guess you'd know."

"Hrrn." 

"I spent weeks," Dan says, eyes still pressed shut. He can feel Rorschach's heat, seeping through both layers of their clothes. He hasn't forgotten the lead pipe at his throat, the gut punch of a familiar smell. "Not knowing either way, and then there you were in my kitchen. Alive. God, I couldn't tell you, how fucking glad—then, you, you—"

"Won't happen again," Rorschach says, sharp. His brow creases, and maybe he's remembering that he thought Dan was dead for a while, too. Remembering that grief.

Dan lies on his back and breathes as the weight of his partner bears down on him. "Let me up," he says, weakly.

"Good talk," Rorschach says, a tightness to his mouth as he straightens, gets on his feet. "Glad we had it."

"Don't be like that."

"Like what." He offers Dan his hand. It makes Dan ache with the familiarity, like this could be any one of the times he's helped Nite Owl out of an alley gutter. 

Dan takes it, grasping firmly. "Like you," he says, without meaning it. 

"Thought that's what you wanted."

Dan feels the power in Rorschach's arm as he pulls him up; the strength in the fingers clasped around his own. With his feet under him, he should let go. Instead he leans into Rorschach's space and pins their hands between them. He can feel Rorschach, firm against his thigh. 

He looks him in the face, trying to get a read on him. It's something he finds absurdly difficult without the mask.

Rorschach makes a noise in his throat but doesn't break eye contact. "I'm fine, Daniel." There is a blunt sincerity in his words. 

Dan smiles despite himself. "I don't think that's ever been the case," he says, as kindly as he can. 

Rorschach accepts that with something approaching equanimity. "Know I was difficult, sometimes." He tightens his grip on Dan's hand, pushing him a half-step back until his shoulders hit the wall, then leans in, quietly menacing in a way that makes Dan's breath stutter. His nose brushes Dan's neck, beneath his ear. "Can smell Laurel on you."

"She knows," Dan tells him. He lets himself feel the fullness of his arousal, the pulse heavy between his legs. Adrenaline crashes over him in cold waves. He feels lightheaded. "She knows how I feel about you."

Rorschach growls in the back of his throat, maybe possessiveness, maybe disgrace, and Dan wonders if he's laying out the conversation in his mind, piecing it together like a puzzle, like evidence. His free hand fumbles at Dan, suddenly intent on finding the shape of him through the denim of his jeans, around the thick stitching of the zipper; the heel of his hand grinds hard over his cock. 

Dan groans and tries to buck into it. Rorschach shoves him against the wall, pushing a soft gasp out of him with the hands fisted against his stomach. Dan catches a moment of hesitation, an unease settling around his eyes, but then he's yanking at Dan's fly, thumbing the button free. 

Rorschach is touching him. He's dragging Dan out of his underwear and his hand is dry and rough, calloused and ungentle and it should be terrible. This should be the worst hand-job. He is so close already it's stupid. 

Dan wrests one-handed at Rorschach's pants, trying to work the zipper down but his belt is the way. He gives up in frustration and gives himself over to the relentless squeeze and turn of Rorschach's fist instead.

Is this the way he touches himself, Dan wonders. Is this how he brings himself off, when he's thinking of— 

"Rorschach." He pulls his hands free to grab at him, bunching both fists in his shirt and—

Rorschach grabs the back of his neck and pins him with that hand while Dan comes over the other.

"Fuck," he breathes, when Rorschach unfastens his belt with urgency and starts stroking himself. Dan doesn't know if he realizes he's using— that his hand is slicked with—

Dan slides to his knees and presses his mouth to Rorschach's wet knuckles. He moans, sudden and surprised, and that's what finally breaks his stoicism. He can't seem to keep the noises he's making under control. They shake out of him along with his orgasm, short brutal sounds like he's being stabbed. 

He buckles, and Dan gathers him in, kisses him, just once. Rorschach mutters his name and pushes back against his mouth; it's clumsy and that's fine, that's all right, and that's all Dan wants. 

For everything to be all right.

*

The sun is setting rapidly now, casting tattered-edged shadows around the neighborhood. Laurie's finishing her smoke when Dan appears, looking pretty disheveled for a guy who allegedly just washed and shaved. She raises her eyebrows at him. 

He just gives a weird little half-shrug back at her.

"Wow, Dan," she says. "I can't tell if he jumped your bones or beat your ass."

Dan sits next to her on the stoop, clears his throat. "A little from column A," he says. "A little from— uh."

Laurie reaches out, relishes the deep flush that blooms as she wipes a little something off his cheek. She briefly considers licking her thumb, but she's pretty sure he couldn't handle that right now. "That's pretty messed up," she says, half to herself, half to him.

"Well, that's basically our motto." Dan smiles at her, beatific.

*

*

It's a sweltering midsummer night and Rorschach is in the Nest with Daniel and Laurel. There's a map of the five boroughs spread on the workbench in front of them, and a litter of newspaper pages, all folded and marked in a way that's particular to him.

Their nights are full of adrenaline and passion, and he hates it and loves it in equal measure, as much as he always has. The city's heart is restored, pumping a new life into the streets, and new opportunities for those who cling to the underbelly of their world. 

Daniel smiles at him, sharp under Nite Owl's mask, and he answers with a turn of his mouth that is transmuted into an inky leer by his mask. Laurel laughs and touches his shoulder, like she sometimes does.

He knows he is getting too slow, too _old_ for this, and one day it will cost him. Maybe when he crosses paths with Ozymandias. Or if Ozymandias crosses paths with him. Or maybe when winter draws in again, blankets everything in its paralyzing, crystalline whiteness, freezes up his aching body.

All he knows is that when it happens, he will not be on his knees, and he will not be alone.

 

*


End file.
